Whiskey River

by Loren D. Estleman

  “How deep are you into him?”

  “I bought a brewery. You figure it out.”

  “Why a brewery, with Canada five minutes away?”

  “Beer’s where the money is, but it takes up too much space coming across. I bailed a guy out. He was making that legal three-two wolverine piss and going under, so I bought the works.”

  He was being uncharacteristically modest. By the time it was finished, Jack Dance’s brewery would represent the largest single bootlegging investment in Detroit since the frantic six months following the passage of the Volstead Act. Pooling his chiseled profits with the resources of his handful of loyalists in return for venture shares, he had acquired the brewery and the warehouse that sheltered it and was at that moment engaged in retooling and in employing experts to improve upon the brewing techniques used by Machine in his less ambitious operation. With the help of an immigrant German brewmeister named Scherwein and three tank trucks purchased from a failed gas company in Toledo for deliveries to his commercial customers—the trucks painted to resemble Standard Oil tankers—he would threaten Machine’s East Side monopoly with a superior product offered at competitive prices.

  What Jack never mentioned, and what didn’t come out until he and Joey were both dead and Sal Borneo was defending himself in court against charges of income tax evasion and interstate labor racketeering, was that Jack’s major cash outlay involved bribing certain authorities to let his enterprise alone. For this he had borrowed heavily from loan sharks connected with the Unione Siciliana. It was an old underworld maxim that the Italians would sell a paisan into slavery for a greater share of the market, and here was one Jew willing to put it to the test. Meanwhile Borneo pocketed the proceeds and went on playing the disinterested mediator.

  I took down as much as Jack was willing to share about the brewery, as well as the details of his posturing in the face of the Machine threat, which was in the process even then of being resolved through Unione efforts. When I got up to leave:

  “Come back when this is over and cover my wedding.” Jack dry-fired the Luger at a kewpie doll on a shelf, testing the action.

  “Who threw the loop over you?”

  His smile over the pistol was actually shy. “Her name’s Vivian Deering. You saw her at the Graystone the night after the Erie run.”

  I remembered the woman with the Greek profile. “I know that name.”

  Andy said, “You should. She was Gus Woodbine’s old lady.”

  “She ain’t no old lady,” Jack said testily.

  It’s funny how you forget things. In 1922, when Vivian Deering Woodbine was sixteen, she had sued Philip Howard Augustus Woodbine, General Motors’ major stockholder, for divorce on grounds that he had mistreated her during their marriage of three months. The details of their relationship, including weekend visits to a nudist colony in Florida and the collection of feather dusters Woodbine maintained in the bedroom of their Grosse Pointe mansion, had kept the tabloids hugging themselves for weeks. They might have squeezed another month out of “Dearie and Daddy” had not Woodbine, despondent over the divorce and the fact that his own Woodbine motorcar never got off the drawing board because of the monopolistic practices of Henry Ford, shot himself to death with an elephant gun he had carried while on safari with Teddy Roosevelt in Africa. He left ten million dollars to Vivian in his will, but attorneys for his grown son and daughter had stalled it in probate.

  I sat back down. “Where’d you meet?”

  “This ain’t for print.” He laid down the Luger and wiped gun oil from his hands, paying special attention to his manicure. “I was collecting for Joey last August at the Club Royale and when I come out of the office she was sitting at a table. She was with this stiff from Des Moines or someplace; he was here for his college reunion in Ann Arbor. He was three sheets to the wind, so I tipped a waiter to pour him into a cab and sat down to keep her company. You should’ve seen her.” He drew a gold watch from a vest pocket and popped it open. Inside the lid was a photograph, tinted with oils, of the woman with the dark blonde hair and the classic nose. I knew then why I hadn’t recognized her. In 1922 she had been slightly chubby and worn her hair bobbed. The new style was a lot less brassy.

  “The watch is nice too. Gift?”

  “That’s nothing,” Andy said. “You ought to see the cufflinks she gave him. Real diamonds.”

  Lon made an unpleasant kissing noise. Ignoring him, Jack put away the watch.

  “Wedding’s next month if we settle this other thing before then,” he told me. “You’re invited, but no announcement. It’s private.”

  “Formal?”

  “Soup and fish. I’m being fitted.”

  “Bride dressing?” Lon asked.

  Jack snatched up the gun and leaped to his feet, upsetting the card table with a crash and scattering the solitaire game. Lon sat back, regarding him with dead eyes. I was trapped in the deep davenport. Andy froze with the Coke bottle lifted halfway to his lips.

  The cover was off the dynamo now. The sparks from its charging wheels lit Jack’s face.

  Bass Springfield, barefoot and shirtless, appeared on the upstairs landing with his .45 automatic, crouching to peer under the overhang. His chest was blue-black and slabbed with muscle. “Something?”

  That broke the spell. Lon breathed. “Forget I said anything,” he said. “I haven’t been outside for a week.”

  “Shit.” Jack threw the pistol into a wingback chair and turned away, shoving his hands deep in his pockets. “Get out of here, Connie. This place is for shooters.”

  I didn’t argue.

  Jensen came into the office lighting his pipe an hour later just as I finished my column. I asked him if Andrea was around.

  “Her door’s open. You can request an audience.”

  Andrea St. Charles was the Banner’s gossip columnist and covered the woman’s angle on major breaking stories those days when nothing fresh was forthcoming. She was a sob sister in the grand tradition, the warbling voice no one took seriously at press conferences who could dictate a story over the telephone five minutes before deadline that would make an iron girder weep rusty tears. I had been banging around newsrooms for nine years and had never known a better journalist or a more autocratic personality. I poked my head into her office and rapped on the open door.

  “Why, good afternoon, Mr. Minor. What happy circumstance brings Mr. Wolfman’s star columnist to Andrea’s boudoir?”

  It could have passed for one at that. Wolfman was priggish about men and women sharing workspace out of wedlock, and so had given Andrea her own private office, the only one on the floor besides his. She had had it repainted dusky rose, laid down a braided oval rug, and hung ruffled curtains and her framed certificate of membership in the D.A.R. Her desk was standard-issue scarred yellow oak, but she had added a vase with cut flowers that she freshened every day from the florist’s shop down the street. She herself was a flower preserved from another era, the Edwardian: Thin and ethereally pale, her hair dyed black and pinned up under a hat like Robin Hood’s, complete with feather; her bony frame covered by a smartly tailored powder-blue suit, white cotton gloves to the elbows. She looked forty, was probably past fifty. She finished erasing something from the sheet in her typewriter and blew away the shreds.

  “Just passing by,” I said. “What’s on the griddle?”

  “I just got off the telephone with Mrs. Lindbergh. Charming creature. They’re celebrating their first anniversary next week, the darlings.”

  “That’s the beat?”

  “Heavens, no. She’s in the family way. That’s the beat.”

  “Just what the world needs. Another aviator.”

  “Or aviatrix. Oh, twaddle.” She had discovered an ink smudge on the index finger of her right glove. Without hesitating she stripped off the pair, flipped them into her OUTGOING basket, and requisitioned a fresh pair from a drawer in her desk. I don’t know how she did it. I couldn’t type wearing my University of Detroit class ring.
>
  I watched her smooth the gloves over her narrow angular hands. “I need an address, preferably with a phone number. If anyone has it or can get it, it’s you.”

  “Darling boy, Andrea’s no directory. Do you have something for her?”

  I was prepared for that. “A wedding announcement. But you can’t use it until the day they tie the knot.”

  “Pooh. Agreed. Whose address?”

  “Vivian Deering’s.”

  She clucked her tongue. “Be an angel and hand me that telephone.”

  It was within her reach on the desk, a white French job with gold trim, but I picked it up and held it out. She took it and dialed.

  “Darling! Andrea. Aren’t you sweet. Andrea needs a favor.”

  Three “darlings,” two “dear boys,” and a “precious” later, she hung up. I took the telephone from her and put it back on the desk.

  “The Stader,” she said. “Suite 714. The hotel switchboard will put you through.”

  I wrote it down. “Have I proposed to you lately?”

  “You’ll have to ask Mr. St. Charles to grant me that divorce. I think he’s in Switzerland. Who’s the lucky couple?”

  “Vivian Deering and Jack Dance.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Who is Jack Dance?”

  “Read tonight’s paper.”

  “My dear, ladies of my breeding wouldn’t be caught dead reading a rag like the Banner.” She flicked her hands at me. “Shoo, now. It’s quarter to four. Mrs. Lindbergh’s baby turns into a pumpkin in fifteen minutes.”

  I blew her a kiss and got out. In January 1937, Andrea St. Charles was killed when the Ford Tri-Motor she was riding in on her way to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second inaugural ball crashed outside Columbus. I miss her and all her fawning, twittering, indispensable tribe.

  Chapter Ten

  “I’M NOT SURE WHY I agreed to see you. Maybe it was the picture at the top of your column. You didn’t look anything at all like the weasels who pestered me eight years ago.”

  I said, “It’s the pipe.”

  “I was impressed with your writing too,” Vivian Deering said. “It’s pulp, but it sounds like the truth. You wouldn’t believe some of the things they wrote about Gus and me. I’m surprised anyone did.”

  “You have to admit it was a hell of a story. Excuse my language.”

  “All I wanted was a divorce. If I’d been married to a foreman at General Motors it would barely have made the legal notices.”

  “May I quote you?”

  “No. You’re not here to discuss my first marriage. Jack and I agreed on that. Do you take sugar?”

  “Just black.”

  She handed me a cup. I had seen too many William Powell movies. I’d expected a penthouse at least, with a hostess in satin lounging pajamas and a maid named Colette to pour tea. Instead I had been met at the door of a quietly furnished suite by Miss Deering herself, who led me to a balcony with wicker furniture where she proved she could pour coffee from a silver-plated carafe without calling up the troops. She had on a navy cotton dress with a yellow yoke that brought out the highlights in her honey-colored hair. She was not a pretty woman but a handsome one, with frank eyes and a grave mouth and a profile that belonged in ivory.

  On the way through the suite I had noticed the stack of Banners I’d sent her on an end table, next to yesterday’s Times with its Page One account of the truce between Joey Machine and Jack Dance, complete with head shots of the former combatants on either side of a grainy blow-up of Sal Borneo in a fedora, photographed at a funeral in 1928; he shunned cameras. Tom Danzig had stolen a beat on the rest of the city with his first bylined article, about Borneo’s peacemaking coup. Just getting scooped didn’t rankle me half as much as the knowledge that it had been my column about the gang war that had made Jack famous enough to warrant the front page in the first place.

  I sipped coffee and admired the view. It was a picture-postcard day in late May and you could see clear to Belle Isle. The buildings on both sides of the river had razor edges. “Very nice. What do you do, Miss Deering?”

  “Gus gave me a thousand shares of General Motors stock as a wedding present. This is what I do.” She poured a cup for herself and added cream.

  “You’re a bit older than Jack, aren’t you?”

  “I’m twenty-four. He’s twenty. It’s not what you think.”

  “What do I think?”

  “What I’d think, if I weren’t me and Jack weren’t Jack: That he’s after my money. He proposed to me the night we met. I turned him down, of course. The point is he didn’t know then who I was or how much I was worth. All he knew about me was my first name.”

  “He might have known all that going in.”

  “He might have, but he didn’t. I’m a lot less naive than I was in 1922; I can smell a chiseler a mile off. Even when I told him who I was it didn’t mean anything to him. There are still a few Americans who have never read a tabloid, Mr. Minor.” She raised the cup to her lips, watching me.

  “I was just fishing, Miss Deering. I know Jack. He’d swipe a nickel from a street peddler but he wouldn’t marry Garbo to get his hands on a million dollars. He’d rather grab it running.”

  “I agree, except for the part about stealing from a peddler. He has ideas. He doesn’t plan to spend his life as a common hoodlum.”

  “Is that why you’re marrying him?”

  She met my gaze. “I’m marrying him because it’s right. His isn’t the first proposal I’ve had since Gus. The right man had to ask.”

  That’s the thing with smart women, and Vivian was no dummy. When they manage to do something boneheaded it’s usually over a pair of pants. Well, I sat through Jack’s trial for the Sylvester Street killing later and heard more than a few women sigh when he sat down at the defense table. He was big and good-looking like Red Grange, and when he swung open that barn-door grin you could smell female heat all over the gallery. I guess if a slippery politico like Jimmy Walker could trip himself up over a sweet young thing like Betty Compton, women had the same privilege. That’s what the suffragettes had been squawking about. I asked her if they’d set a date.

  “The second Saturday in June. He called today. The reception will be at the Chesterfield Inn.”

  “He asked me not to announce it. I won’t use any of this until after the ceremony, but I had to promise someone a scoop to get your address. Would it be all right if we ran an announcement that night? Chances are you’ll be starting your honeymoon by then.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Where are you going, by the way?”

  She smiled for the first time. “Atlantic City. Jack’s never been there.”

  It was the logical choice. The local rackets had many friends in Jersey, where the New York bosses went to gamble and visit the whorehouses and trade their soiled bills for fresh Detroit green. Atlantic City would represent the exotic end of the universe to Jack Dance and his crowd, many of whom had never been farther from home than Ontario. There he could show off his elegant bride and impress potential backers with the ideas that made Vivian so proud.

  The rest of the questions had to do with her life before and after Woodbine. Not much there, unless you were Andrea St. Charles: Born in Buffalo to a minor railroad baron and his society wife, raised in Southampton, educated in finishing schools, introduced to the auto magnate at a party on Long Island when she was sixteen, married to him six weeks later in Detroit with her parents’ consent. The next three months were as well known to readers as Buster Brown’s adventures in the funnies. After Woodbine’s suicide and the reading of the will, his adolescent widow had gone back home to Southampton to live with her parents for a time, but the scribes followed her there and camped out on the patio, so she toured Europe for a year, took the waters, met Mussolini, and saw a bullfight or two before coming back to defend Woodbine’s will from the first of many legal attempts on the part of his children to have it set aside. The press had covered the opening round perfunctori
ly, but probate was too Byzantine for short declarative headlines and it moved on to fresh scandals. Since then, with the exception of visits to Southampton and family, she had been living in town.

  I drank a second cup of coffee, thanked her for the interview, offered congratulations, and left. Sitting on the story until after the wedding wasn’t likely to raise my blood pressure. The bride-to-be was no moll, and shorn of Daddy and his feather dusters she was flatter copy than the Anti-Saloon League’s candidate for President in 1932. Quality folk made poor press. It was one of the reasons I stayed around Detroit.

  The event took place on schedule. Because Vivian was a Catholic who had nettled the Church with a noisy public petition for divorce and Jack hadn’t been to Synagogue since he was ten, the couple was united in a brief ceremony in the County Building by a justice of the peace. What the nuptials lacked in pomp the reception at the Chesterfield made up for in volume, with a fourteen-piece dance band blasting out the latest from Chicago and New Orleans for what had to be the largest gathering of area characters this side of the last Prohibition sweep, cutting up the floor in monkey suits with janes in beads and satin who hadn’t been off their backs for that many hours in succession since Coolidge. Jack looked as fit as Dempsey in white tie and tails, and Vivian, wearing green sequins and a diamond choker, stole the show from the wedding cake, which was as tall as Howard Wolfman and came courtesy of Sal Borneo. Borneo himself couldn’t be there but sent someone in his place: a smooth dark Italian in his late twenties named Frankie Orr, who spent the evening nursing the same drink and memorizing faces. Also absent was Joey Machine, but a package with a card signed by him stood taller than all the other gifts on the table. Jack made a show of ducking when it was opened. It turned out to be a cut-glass vase for long-stemmed roses, imported from England.

  “A dame must of picked it out,” said Andy Kramm, who wasn’t feeling much pain by then. “Joey wouldn’t know crystal from his dago ass.”

  Jack was less ebullient. In his circle you never knew what was meant by a gift involving flowers.